


To Swift Decay and Burn

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: The Witch (2016)
Genre: Apples, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreams vs. Reality, F/F, Inspired by Poetry, Manipulation of Dreams, Temptation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 05:18:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17698382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: Thomasin dreams of witches, apples, and seeing the world. But there's darkness lurking in the sweetness of the visions.





	To Swift Decay and Burn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiriamKenneath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiriamKenneath/gifts).



In her dreams, Thomasin dances with the Devil’s minion. 

She is uncertain about when the dancing dreams began. Perhaps it was the night after Samuel disappeared, or perhaps they began even before that. In the settlement, Thomasin made a concentrated effort to stifle her dreams, to forget them as soon as she woke. To focus on them would have opened windows in her mind that she would have preferred to keep locked tight. But here, far from any people but her family, Thomasin cannot keep her dreams at bay.

They all start the same: a path in the woods, lit only by the cold glow of the moon, the trees around it skeletal and shadowy, cutting the light into wispy ribbons. Thomasin hurries along it, naked, but unable to feel the cold as anything more than a harmless prickle, her breath coming short and fast. 

What is at the end of the path, Thomasin does not know, for it is both forever dark and just within her reach. The path is widening; she breaks into a run. 

The clearing ahead is bathed in moonlight. There is a woman there, and her cloak is a bright, vegetal red, like apples in the fall. In her hand she holds an apple, and beneath the cloak she is as naked as Eve. With a sly glance towards Thomasin, she lets her cloak fall from her shoulders, leaving her pale in the darkness. Her chest is darkened with a rusty paste, like mud or blood. 

“Who are you, goodwife?” Thomasin asks.

She is sick with anticipation as she waits for the answer. 

“I’m everything you’ve ever wanted. And—” here she laughs— “no goodwife, I.” 

The apple in her hand is dark and lustrous, a shimmering of red and green in the moonlight. It is the most vivid thing Thomasin has seen since her family set out from the settlement, and it seems so real that on waking, she cannot quite believe that it is a thing spun from dreams and stardust. 

The woman laughs again. In the dimness, her teeth look sharper than they should.  _ Perhaps,  _ Thomasin thinks,  _ she is hungry.  _

“I want you to be happy. Come, dance with me.”

“But what about your apple?” Thomasin asks, and immediately curses herself for sounding stupid. 

“Why don’t you eat it?” the woman says. 

Her voice is so kind and so inviting, and Thomasin feels something icy melt away from her heart. She takes the fruit from the woman, holds it reverently, as if it is Mother’s silver cup. It is cool against her skin, tacky with the stickiness of picked fruit. She lifts it to her lips. 

“A bite should do,” the woman says, as Thomasin devours the apple hungrily. “My, you must be starving.” 

The apple is so sweet that Thomasin does not realize she has already gnawed it to the core and ingested a few of the seeds. They scratch her throat as she swallows. The juice drips down between her fingers, down over her chin. The woman laughs. 

“Come, dance.” 

And she pulls Thomasin towards her with surprising strength, and this is no common circle dance, no Maypole such as she can recall in half-remembered fragments from far-off England. The woman’s grip is tight, their naked bodies flush against each other, and there is no movement. Just the closeness of death. 

And then the woman’s lips are upon hers in a kiss as sweet as apples, heady and intoxicating with its weight. Thomasin sighs, sags into it, tastes the summer in this unforeseen embrace. She feels suddenly that she is sinning, but who can think of sin when feeling such pleasure? The woman licks the juice of the apple from her lips. 

“Hush, hush, There is no sinning here,” the woman whispers, and Thomasin does not think to ask why she can hear her thoughts. 

She looks down at her body, and it is smeared with the same red paste the woman is adorned with. Against her flesh, it looks like dried blood. 

“What is this?” Thomasin asks, bringing a hand to her chest, touching the ointment. 

It comes away sticky, darkened red. 

“It can make you fly, my love. Think not so much on it. Think only of what you want. Do you want, perhaps, to see another way to live? A brighter way, a better way? A way with fewer silly rules?” 

The woman spins her around, as if they are really dancing. She lets Thomasin escape briefly from her grasp, only to pull her tighter in. Her hands ghost across Thomasin’s body, towards the place between her legs. 

“We could fly now, you know. I could take you to meet others like us. All you would need to do would be to make your mark in a little book, to bind yourself to my Master. But it’s not really a binding, is it, when you could feel freedom, and see the whole world? I could show you so much, if you accept the path, give in. You could keep tasting all the fruits.” 

Her touch is like fire and feathers, and Thomasin lets out a gasp. 

“Show me everything,” she whispers to the woman, to the witch. “I want to see the whole world. I want to keep dancing.” 

***

Thomasin wakes sweating from these dreams, her mind too stuffed with magic to understand the waking world. In the grey dawn, she shakes and mumbles, and tastes apples on her mouth. It is always all so real, and always all so beautiful. And, she is sure, it is all a lie. Witches cannot beautiful. The Devil does not show a world of wonders at the meetings of his followers. The beautiful witch of the woods always wrinkles and fades to a crone at the end of the dreams, the vibrancy of the visions twist and darken like the shadows of trees, and Thomasin is left shivering in the dawning woods, naked and covered in filth she recognizes as blood. But there is the taste of summer in her mouth, and the pictures of the kisses and embraces in her mind. The feeling of the flying ointment still lingers upon her skin, sticky as summer, reeking of iron and salt. She should be disgusted, but she is not, and when she drags herself to wakefulness and peers out at the dark line of the trees, Thomasin is consumed by a lust unlike any she has ever felt before. 

It takes all her willpower to not run for the woods at once in the bright light of the daytime. But she is so thirsty for embraces, and like Eve, she hungers for apples. 

**Author's Note:**

>  ~~you have no idea how much I wanted to title this 'hug me, kiss me, suck my juices'~~.  
> Your request for dark initiation rituals coupled with the various mentions of apples and the imagery of fouled food in the film led me to go "hey, you know what might be fun? Thomasin/Witch fanfic thematically influenced by Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market." And there you have it! Hope you enjoy!  
> Title is, obviously, taken from Goblin Market.


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